As a response to “Afrin Under Attack by Neo-Ottoman Erdogan: We Must Defend Afrin,” a statement published on the website of the Coalition for Peace, Revolution, and Social Justice on January 22, Fredo Corvo’s posing of the question, “Is the defense of Afrin proletarian internationalism?” (Libcom, 5 March), unfortunately presents several arguments based on straw-men. Though he ostensibly writes from a libertarian-communist perspective, he dedicates much effort to critiquing Marxist humanism, thus overlooking the fact that our Coalition represents a convergence of different revolutionary-left groupings and individuals. Plus, Corvo’s critique is only vaguely anti-capitalist, far from being concretely humanist or anti-imperialist. It is unclear whether Corvo’s critique can be…

The Burmese military that effectively rules the Southeast Asian State of Myanmar is currently engaged in a campaign of intensifying genocide against the country’s Rohingya minority. Of the 1 million Rohingyas who were estimated to have lived in Myanmar’s northwestern Rakhine State before this newest episode of ethnic cleansing, approximately one thousand have been killed and over a half-million displaced in the past two months. These Rohingya refugees, many of whom are women and children, have fled the brutal scorched-earth tactics of the Burmese State for neighboring Bangladesh—although over 100,000 remain internally displaced in Rakhine in perilous conditions.

The Rohingyas of Burma

The dispossessed Rohingyas have confronted mass-murder, torture, and sexual assault and had their homes torched and their crops destroyed. Scores of villages have been burnt to the ground. In addition, the Burmese military has installed a series of landmines adjacent to the Naf River that divides Myanmar from Bangladesh, both to harm those fleeing and to dissuade their return. Why has this happened?

Many observers point to the ethno-religious aspects of this oppressive dynamic. Whereas the Burmese State is largely controlled by majority ethnic Bamars who are Buddhists, the Rohingya minority—considered by the State to be “Bengalis,” as from the region of Bengal that spans India and Bangladesh—are mostly Muslim, with a Hindu minority. While Islam and Buddhism are not mutually hostile to each other, such fault-lines as differing religious identities have been used in this case to prepare and ultimate rationalize the ongoing genocide. British colonialism—with its logic of racialization and bordering—prepared the groundwork for the atrocities unfolding today, as imperialists used Rohingyas during the war against Japan and even at one point promised them independence, a promise later revoked. Since its 1962 takeover in the early post-colonial period following Burmese independence from Britain in 1948, the military has promoted Buddhist nationalism as an ideal and excluded many of the country’s ethnic minorities, none more than the Rohingya. In 1974, the State identified all Rohingyas as foreigners; in 1982, it formally revoked their collective citizenship.

Military “Clearance Operations”

Over the past half-century, the State has systematically starved, enslaved, and massacred the Rohingya people. In response, between the 1970s and August 2017, an estimated 1 million Rohingyas fled Burma/Myanmar, with 168,000 refugees crossing State borders between 2012 and August 2017. In violation of international law, Rohingya refugees have been forcibly repatriated to Rakhine several times over the past 40 years. This time, however, the ethnic cleansing appears to be meant to be final.

In his report on an October 2017 meeting with the U.S. ambassador, General Min Aung Hlaing, the Burmese commander accused of ordering the ongoing atrocities, falsifies history by claiming that the Rohingyas are “not native” but rather foreigners who were introduced to the country by British imperialism. Such a self-serving account overlooks the historical presence of Muslims in Rakhine since at least the fifteenth century and conveniently erases the cosmopolitan past in which Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists coexisted without war. Ominously, Aung Hlaing has publicly declared that the ongoing “clearance operations” are meant to resolve “unfinished business” from Burma’s independence. For her part, State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, the former political prisoner and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, is entirely complicit in these crimes, given her guarding of silence on the current crisis and her past rejection of the idea that the State’s military campaigns in Rakhine constitute ethnic cleansing.

The “Last Asian Frontier” to Capital

Yet however much responsibility for the Rohingya genocide rests with the Burmese military and ruling class, capitalist and imperialist elements play important roles in the oppression of the Rohingyas as well. The power of the Burmese State and military has grown hand-in-hand with the expanding extraction of its fossil-fuel resources and the accelerating opening-up of trade and investment in recent years. Having been relatively unknown to global capitalism, Burma/Myanmar is sometimes considered the “last Asian frontier” for capitalist models of plantation agriculture, deforestation, mega-mining, and the super-exploitation of labor.

Over the past two decades, the State has dispossessed millions of Buddhist peasants of their land to make way for corporate-extractivist projects, and before the current crisis erupted, the State had already awarded a million hectares in Rakhine for “corporate development” schemes. In northern Rakhine, moreover, the State has plans to establish a “special economic zone” with Chinese investors to construct oil and gas pipelines to the tune of $10 billion. When one considers that all burnt land in Burma reverts to State property, the meaning of its military’s “clearing operations” against the Rohingyas becomes clearer. The ferocity of the State’s response to the coordinated guerrilla attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on 40 Burmese police stations and a military base in Rakhine on August 25, which provoked the current wave of mass-displacement, shows that the ARSA attack is only a pretext for the State to implement its broadly genocidal designs.

Courtesy Showkat Shafi/Al Jazeera

International Complicity in Genocide

Since 1990, China, Russia, Israel, and former Yugoslavian countries have been Burma’s major arms suppliers, while the UK provides training to the Burmese military. In fact, in September 2017, the Israeli State argued before the High Court of Justice that ethics have no place in business or international relations, and that no restrictions should be placed on Israeli arms sales to Burmese security forces. Although the U.S. and the European Union currently observe an embargo on trade in weapons with the country, recent meetings between EU leaders and General Min Aung Hlain suggest that this embargo may well be lifted soon in the interests of profitability.

Moreover, recently at the United Nations, the Trump Regime cynically used accusations of war crimes against the Rohingyas as leverage against the State’s allies, China and Russia. While it is clear that Trump has no actual interest in the Rohingyas as human beings, it bears noting that the Obama administration helped legitimize Suu Kyi and the military junta she serves by suspending sanctions against Burma following her party’s electoral victory in 2015. Of course, overcoming the “barrier” that such sanctions had represented to the expansion of capital serves U.S. imperialist interests as well.

In closing, we condemn the State Terror that has targeted Rohingyas for four decades, leading to the current genocidal catastrophe, and we express our solidarity with those displaced both internally in Burma/Myanmar and as refugees in Bangladesh. We denounce all imperialist and capitalist support for the Burmese junta, whether provided by the U.S., Israel, Russia, or China. We take inspiration from the mutual aid provided by Bangladeshis to the Rohingya refugees, even as that country confronts mass-inundation and disappearance due to rising sea levels that result from capital-induced climate change. We look forward to the potential unification of peasantry and working class across ethnic lines against the Burmese State, and we demand justice.

Please save the date for Saturday, October 8th, 2016, for the Sixth
Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair at Cielo Galleries! Please join us as
we relaunch this radical space for discussion and organizing after a
three-year hiatus. This year’s bookfair themes are displacement,
gentrification, and ecological crisis.

As members of the Bookfair Collective, we believe it is critical to
express protest and rebellion against the highly authoritarian
capitalist-State system that by its very nature offers nothing more
than endless war, vast social inequality, and utter ecological ruin.
We seek to promote solidarity and unity among the various struggling
communities of Los Angeles, Southern California, and the occupied
region of the U.S. Southwest.

In light of the ongoing mass-refugee crisis, ever-worsening climate
change, and the profound plight of the global working classes as
juxtaposed with an explosion in the number of billionaires worldwide
and the mirror-image of the international resurgence of the far-Right,
we feel it is necessary to bring this space back as a testament to the
realities and potentialities of popular resistance movements in
Southern California and beyond.

We believe that anarchist ideas and practices retain all their
relevance today, and are indeed more important now than ever before,
especially amidst the depth of imperialist militarism and ecological
destruction for which capitalism is responsible.

How we advance collective counter-power against a system that is
prepared to destroy humanity and nature simply to uphold privilege and
irrationality is our challenge. We hope you will join us in asking
the questions, finding the answers, and discovering the joy and power
of solidarity in the struggle for the creation of a better world.

You can download applications to present a workshop or be present at
the bookfair as a vendor by accessing our website athttp://la.anarchistbookfair.com. Admission to the bookfair is free of
charge. We are currently seeking sponsors who wish to support this
year’s fair. We hope to see you on October 8th!

Five years after the beginning of the popular Syrian Revolution which demanded democracy and human rights, the Syrian revolutionaries have been decimated through the combined military force of the Assad Regime, the Iranian regime with its sectarian militias, Russian air strikes and military assistance on the one hand, and the ultra-terrorist ISIS and other Salafist – Jihadist organizations on the other hand. Nevertheless a partial reduction of airstrikes by Russia and the Assad regime in early March led to an immediate revival of mass protests of the democratic opposition across the country with banners such as the following in Idlib: “Our peaceful revolution is still in progress until toppling Assad and imposing justice all over Syria.”

Almost half a million people, mostly Sunni Arab Syrians, have been killed mainly by the Assad regime. The population faces a situation that is worsening daily. Russian air raids, Hizbullah and Iranian supported ground forces as well as the December 18, 2015 United Nations Security Council Resolution backed by the U.S., Russia, China, France and Britain have all given new life to the Assad Regime.

At the same time, the Saudi monarchy and the Iranian regime are intensifying their competition for control over the region by fanning the flames of religious sectarianism. The Turkish government has in turn intensified its attacks on and repression of the Kurds in Turkey and northern Syria and also plays a role in promoting religious sectarianism in the region. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has praised Hitler’s “presidential system” as a model of “efficiency.”

The Syrian refugee crisis, with over 8 million refugees inside and over 4 million refugees outside Syria has become a much larger version of the Palestinian al-Nakba. The European Union is setting refugee quotas, closing its gates and implementing an agreement with Turkey based on which Turkey would take more refugees in exchange for 3 billion Euros and a possible future membership in the European Union. This is clearly not a solution. Neither Turkey nor any other country in the Middle East region is willing to admit over 12 million refugees and give them the possibility of a decent life.

As Syrian and Iranian socialists, we call on you to join us in taking a stand against this inhumanity and for finding real solutions:

First, we refuse to accept the myth that the Assad regime is the lesser of the two evils and that stabilizing it will end the war in Syria or stop the rise of ISIS and other Jihadists. On the contrary, the Assad regime is responsible for the majority of the deaths which are now estimated at half a million. This regime’s destruction of the democratic forces embodied in the Syrian revolution has created a fertile ground for the rise of ISIS and other Salafist-Jihadist groups.

Secondly, given the fact that both the Assad regime and ISIS are capitalist, racist, misogynist governments, no viable alternative to them can be shaped without tackling the class/ethnic/religious divisions and gender discrimination that are present in the Middle East.

Thirdly, while we insist on upholding a principled position of support for the Kurdish national liberation movement and its struggle for self-determination in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran, we think it is also necessary to challenge many of those on the left who separate the struggle for self-determination of the Kurdish people in Syria from the dynamics of the Syrian revolution. It was the 2011 Syrian revolution that made it possible for the autonomous cantons in Rojava to come into existence. Without a Syrian revolution there can be no democratic Rojava. The latest evidence of the coordination and collaboration between the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian regime and the Russian air force is alarming and does not bode well for the Kurds. The liberation and emancipation of the Kurdish people is linked to the liberation and emancipation of the people of the region.

It is time for Syrian and Iranian socialists to work together to challenge class, gender, ethnic and religious prejudices and speak to the struggles of women, workers, oppressed nationalities such as Kurds and Palestinians, oppressed ethnic and religious minorities, and sexual minorities. It is time for us to restate socialism as a concept of human emancipation not only opposed to the regional and global capitalist-imperialist powers but also as an affirmative vision distinguished from the totalitarian regimes that called themselves Communist in the former Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China. […]